You signed up for a £10 per-month shared plan on Hostinger, noticed the site crawl at lunch, and wondered if a different host could keep the price but deliver steadier performance. The price tag alone is misleading; what you pay each month buys a set of assumptions about how the host runs its servers, how it treats support tickets, and who actually controls the hardware.
Price looks the same, but the math underneath is not
Hostinger advertises a "1 GB RAM" shared plan for about £10 per month. In practice that number sits on a server that may be feeding hundreds of sites, each claiming the same slice. The overselling model works by assuming most sites will be idle at the same time. TrueCore's Flameling plan also costs £10 per month, but the numbers we publish are tied to real resources: 4 GB of storage, five email accounts, and a SQLite database. There is no hidden pool of RAM that we promise and never deliver.
Our pricing sheet shows the backing for each tier. The Ember plan at £20 per month adds three sites, 40 GB of storage, and a full PostgreSQL 16 instance per customer. The Blaze plan doubles the site count and bumps storage to 60 GB. These numbers are not marketing fluff; they reflect the actual capacity we reserve for each customer.
How resources are enforced
Hostinger typically relies on soft limits set inside PHP or Apache configurations. Those limits can be ignored until a monitoring script steps in, which means a single busy site can temporarily hog CPU or RAM and affect neighbours.
TrueCore enforces limits at the kernel level. Every container runs under flame-bubble, which combines bwrap, cgroups, and namespaces. The cgroup hierarchy caps CPU and memory before a process can exceed its allocation. A quick look inside a container shows the hard limit in place:
If you compare that to a host that only sets php_value memory_limit in php.ini, the difference is clear. Hard limits prevent one site from starving another, and they are visible on our public capacity page. When a node reaches its slot limit, sign-ups pause automatically.
Our monitoring daemon flame-watchman checks each node every 5 minutes. If a node approaches its soft ceiling, the panel warns new users and redirects traffic. The heartbeat from flame-sentinel runs every 60 seconds and posts status updates to our Discord channel, so you can see if a node is under pressure in real time.
Support model that matches the philosophy
When your site stalls on a large oversold platform, the ticket queue is often flooded with similar complaints. Hostinger offers a generic live-chat that routes you to a pool of agents, many of whom are handling dozens of tickets at once.
TrueCore is currently run by a single engineer (the founder) handling email and portal tickets during business hours. Because the customer count is low, each ticket gets a direct response from the person who wrote the stack. We do not promise 24/7 phone support, but we do promise that a real person will read your email and act within the next business day.
The trade-off is clear: you give up the illusion of round-the-clock phone lines, but you gain accountability. We offer a £1 / 14-day trial — you commit £1 to start, get the full plan for 14 days, and can walk away during the window for the cost of the £1 (which is not refundable, but is the only money you'd lose if you don't continue). That level of trust is harder to offer when you are selling thousands of identical seats on a single server.
Infrastructure ownership and transparency
Hostinger rents hardware from large data-center operators and presents the service as a monolithic offering. The exact location of the servers is often hidden behind a generic "global network" label. Because the hardware is pooled, you cannot verify what physical resources back your plan.
TrueCore builds on rented infrastructure from Netcup (DE), RackNerd (US), and a boutique provider in Sofia, Bulgaria. Each node—ember, spark, and litespeed—runs Alpine 3.19.9 or 3.23.4 with the latest stable Linux kernel (6.6.117 on ember). The DNS layer uses our own flame-dnsd daemon, which propagates changes across three authoritative nameservers in under five seconds using inotify and WireGuard-secured rsync. Backups are taken with restic, encrypted before they leave the server, and stored in per-node Backblaze B2 buckets.
Because we write our own process supervisor flame-super and firewall flame-guardian, we can see exactly what runs on each node. This visibility lets us troubleshoot quickly and avoid the "black-box" failures that are common with larger, opaque providers.
When the philosophy matters to you
If you need a cheap entry point and can tolerate occasional slowdowns during peak hours, an overselling host may fit the bill. If you run a business site that must stay responsive during office hours, the difference between soft and hard limits becomes a daily reality.
Choosing TrueCore means paying a little extra for guaranteed resources, transparent infrastructure, and a single engineer who actually wrote the stack. The price per month lines up with the cheapest plans you find elsewhere, but the underlying commitments are different. One host promises "unlimited" on a paper-thin promise; the other promises "what we say we deliver" and backs it with kernel-enforced caps, public capacity data, and a support model built for accountability.
Your website's health is more than a price tag. Look at the numbers, the enforcement mechanisms, and the people behind the service. That's where the true value lives.